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In a surprise, overnight move, Rincon Broadcasting yanked Progressive Talk Radio from its 1490 AM channel on Wednesday morning and replaced the left-leaning slate of programs with a Spanish language music format. The move, which came a month or so after the call letters were changed from KIST to KSPE, was a financial decision, as Progressive Talk was not profitable.

Rincon’s Keith Royer confirmed the move. “It’s always important in supporting a format to give it enough time to get its legs,” he explained. “Having run this format for five years, we just figured that we need to take a direction that would allow the station to be profitable for once.” Rincon is pinning those hopes on “La Preciosa,” which is technically a recuerdos format and is also simulcast currently on 94.5 FM. “It’s growing segment,” said Royer.

“Progressive Talk is no more in Santa Barbara,” said Edward Bear, a radio veteran who co-hosted and co-produced a weekend show with former Assemblymember Hannah-Beth Jackson. He said that Jackson had learned of the decision during a meeting on Monday, but was not sure if and when the other Santa Barbara-based host, Nick Beeson — whose show “Talking with America” aired on Sunday evenings — had heard of the move. Bear understands that the shift came down to money, and knows that Spanish stations repeatedly prove themselves more profitable than progressive talk shows. But it was not expected. “It was done very suddenly,” he said.

The move comes after the station’s call letters were changed from KIST to KSPE in July, said Bear, who explained, “Me as the old radio hand should have recognized something was in the offing the minute they changed the call letter, but I did not.” Bear says his time there was “very good,” and that the station “gave us free reign to do the show as we wanted to do it.”

Comments

please don't equate npr with talk radio. npr is radio journalism while talk radio is opinion. and now we don't have a local counterpoint to the megaphone of far right opinion that sprays out of all the other talk radio stations in the region. sad day for sb.

I second the sentiment re: NPR. I stopped listening to 1490 on a regular basis after last summer, "The Summer of Discontent", was reprising itself at the beginning of this summer, "The Summer of Hate". Both Fox AND Progressive Radio have become even more shrill, with people shouting over each other, trying to convince us what we should think. Even though Progressive Radio tends to be more fact-based vs. the made up stuff on Fox Radio and TV, it has had to attempt to become as shrill in order to compete for ratings, and, let's face it - facts are just not as viscerally exciting as attacking someone or something in the basest terms possible, truth be damned.

I have found that NPR gives me enough of the news that I need to remain adequately informed, and paces it with a lot of non-political news that is, at least for me, important for intellectual balance. NPR combines a good combination of hard news, politics, entertainment, comedy, pop culture, science, and insight into other cultures and peoples of the world. It is not "All Politics, All The Time". I got burned out, having been a "political junkie" since I was 16. NPR presents the facts, and lets me decide what they mean - they don't preach to me. I realize that many people prefer it the other way around, hence the financial viability of Fox "News" Radio and TV. I am capable of digesting the facts, filtering out the rhetoric from both sides, and arriving at a conclusion of my own. I welcome hard facts from both sides of the issues, and I stress the word "facts". To hear a commentator, even those with whom I share a world view, push a particular agenda over and over again, and often "going off" on their own self-important rants to either sell books or just inflate their own sense of importance grows old. Fox "News" has created a business model that works, not because they have the market on the truth cornered, but because they have found a formula to market their "truths" in a manner in which people who are uninformed, under-informed, or just plain ignorant in general find appealing.

It is sad that both sides of the political discourse cannot be supported in a city like SB, with two other stations airing right wing propaganda all day, every day. One editorial comment - maybe better local programming would have helped. The local shows, on the whole, were very weak. One business comment - interrupting a program which is discussing an important social issue with local semi-pro baseball games, or women's basketball is not conducive to building a loyal following. I'm just saying ....

Finally, those of you who wish to follow the shows formerly broadcast on 1490 AM can stream them live in the same time slots on 1150 AM, "LA Talk-Radio" on your computers.

Or, this means that listeners of "progressive talk radio" use their Internets and not radios, while listeners of Spanish language advertising still use 20th Century technology. Draw your own conclusions about all kinds of sociopolitical implications of that.

Nonetheless, a tough economic model for making money to pay the programmers. Will miss Nick Beeson here.

I don't like NPR. They called Howard Zinn a crackpot. Kpfk (98.7FM in Santa Barbara) has two hilarious hosts-Harrison (mon. and tues. @ 3pm) and Jimmy Dore (weds. @ 3pm). Both are irreverent and informative. Tune in for a laugh, considering we're mourning a loss and might need a chuckle.

And I understand that as we age it gets harder to deal with technology and so I guess I'll just listen to some old records or something until I drop or the stylus is obsolete. So the airwaves will all be right wing blather anyway and capitalism will be solidified as our religion.

Try satellite radio in your house using 88.1 FM as a conduit. Right now Randi Rhodes is on one station and Thom Hartmann is on another station. Two liberals stations! Plus, you can get MSNBC, CNN and NPR Radio in addition to dozens of sports, information and music stations. I like talk radio so it is worth it to me ($100 per year plus radio) and was easy to install.

So disappointed in this! I thought something was wrong with my radio. Apparently there is a bigger wrong in losing our liberal station. I am really going to miss my car radio time. Sorry, NPR is great, but not the same thing.

Rather cowardly of them not to prepare their audience for the shift. And to those who say, simply, "Just stream it online or get satellite radio," some people in our community cannot afford those things right now and still depend on the FREE PUBLIC AIRWAVES (that part of the "commons" that we liberals are supposedly sworn to defend) to get their information.

Why am I not surprised? It all came down to advertising dollars. And corporate rightie hate radio gets its money from, well, corporations. Let's all just sit back, drink the Kool Aid and do nothing about it. There's really no money to be made from conservation and saving the environment - and frankly, I don't get the impression that democrats are all that 'with it' anyways. The world's going to hell I'm afraid.

hope Rincon Broadcasting reads these comments....personally, I am saddened by the loss of a local progressive radio station...I guess the money wins out again....but I'm amazed that a Spanish speaking music station, whose format sounds more like something from a county fair, would prove more profitable that progressive talk --- especially since there seem to be so many other Spanish speaking music stations available. Well, at least majority of the Spanish speaking audience is progressive, and is likely to vote Liberal. Go Obama!

American journalism, especially television and radio, is now ranked as among the worst of western industrialized nations. Too much commentary, gutless, virtually no investigative reporting and a systemic aversion in covering anything that might be detrimental to their corporate masters. Very sad. Not only is it ensuring a poorly uninformed public but it ultimately results in very bad public policy that rarely serves the interests of the taxpayer.

Someone's gotta say it, so it might as well be me: Haven't we got enough of these CRAPPY Mex-tune stations blaring the same terrible music across the dial? I mean c'mon: The Mexican pop culture music is bad, reeeeeal bad. Unlistenable. When in Europe, I enjoy nearly every other culture's music though I cannot tell you what they're always singing about.

But the Mexican tuba-laden, patently silly songs they play for our local immigrants is so bad, so corporately cloned from clones of clones, that any real ethnic music is sacrificed before it's ever stuck a toe-lobe out the auditory canal.

Yes, I know: banda, ranchera, all the other variant names they give the virtual same-sounding blither---it still sounds the same: formulaic, non-innovative, & drivelsome.

Having just arrived back in SB after a two-week roadtrip, I have reset my 1490 station select to SILENCE. Much better than the marauding Mexification of our local airwaves and I'll probably go XM or Sirius for my Hartman, the only radio Miller with a brain in Stephanie, Schultz, & Randi Rhodes.

Time to abolish the FCC (or at least regulate it so that it performs only what it was originally mandated to do in keeping emergency frequencies free from interference) and let the people broadcast micro-watt stations as they wish.

And before any of you lunkheads begin to think about "going there"---I have a varied mixture of European and Central American Latin blood coursing through my otherwise clear channel-free veins, thank you very much.

I can't believe that AM 1490 progressive talk radio in Santa Barbara was unprofitable. While I listened, particularly to Thom Hartmann, time for the many commercials seemed to be almost as long as content time. I must conclude that this was a political decision, part of the right-wing election campaign.

Thom Hartmann, by the way, though unabashedly liberal, is very knowledgeable, fair minded, honest, and probably as popular in most markets as any of the right-wing hacks.